Circumstance (2011) Iranian filmmaker Maryam Keshavarz' award-winning film is playing at the Landmark Sunshine in NYC

Last night J and I went to see this movie together. A group of Persian women who'd driven in from Jersey chattered and giggled at the Farsi slang two rows behind us. After the film they told me they didn't like it that much. Two young men got up and left promptly after a violent rape scene. J and I hadn't seen a movie together since we went to Revolutionary Road and bawled our eyes out. We are masochistic movie-goers more often than not. We never, ever, ever, see romcoms (in theatres).

She'd seen it months ago at a special screening with her mom, and told me that night that we had to see it together, because the love story was something we would understand so intimately. There is something so distinct about the way that two girls can love each other, it doesn't have to be sexual, but it often is--at least in some aesthetic way.

I was watching these two little girls playing on the train the other day. The one was tucking the other's long braids behind her ears, so delicately, and they were giggling. They must have been about six years old. They put their faces close together and batted their eyelashes at one another, lips almost brushing cheeks with every secret. Not because they were trying to seduce one another, but because the way a little girl loves her best friend is something seductive in and of itself. I've been more enamoured with my female friends than I ever have been or will be with a man. And I love men, believe you me.

There is an ethos captured in Circumstance that only young girls who have been wholly and completely in love with each other, and in love with the glossy, teenaged, anxiety-ridden lens through which they see the world could ever connect to. To see the best parts of yourself mirrored in someone else, and to admire them for their flaws and their raw and sometimes disgusting honesty is a young girl's unique possession, I am so grateful to have experienced this kind of relationship. J said to me that there is something generational about it too--to be baby girls who want to do wrong, everything becomes drenched in a sexy-glowing light. The film is not only political in its lesbianism, it is sexual and deviant for the way that it taps into that kind of yearning--to want to feel everything with a girl you're in love with, even bad things, and things that could hurt you.

On those rare days when we get to be suspended in that glossy lens for hours at a time, M says she's blissed out. What a perfect way to describe that feeling of timelessness. A phrase approaching the essence of the relationship between the girls in Circumstance. It is something like Audre Lorde's eroticism...inherently female and deeply binding between two persons.

Read "Uses of the Erotic," from Lorde's Sister Outsider. And then go see Circumstance. And then fall in love with your best friend.